The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse (Interpretation and Analysis)

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The Magic Circle
Source: Wikimedia Commons
As the month of October continues, I want to share another piece of art that captures the supernatural spirit of the Halloween season.

Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse returned to the idea of magic many times throughout his career. Over and over again, Waterhouse painted women engaged in acts of prophecy or enchantment. He was particularly fascinated by the mythological figure, Circe, a witch who plays a prominent role in Homer’s Odyssey. The Magic Circle, however, represents one of Waterhouse’s earliest forays into portraying witchcraft.

The subject of the painting is opaque. The central figure is a woman in a long blue dress decorated with a warrior motif. She holds a crescent-shaped sickle in her hand, which links her to the moon and Hecate, according to my research. The background is vague and hazy, but it seems to represent some sort of arid climate. The woman seems to be in the middle of some sort of ritual. She stands over a boiling cauldron that billows steam. The painting captures her in the act of drawing a circle around herself in the ground. The circle is a marker of ritual purity. Ravens and frogs, symbols of evil, are clustered outside the circle while the woman stands inside surrounded by flowers. The eponymous magic circle is a physical and spiritual divide between two states of being.

Taken together, this setting and the symbols it contains convey a mishmash of different cultures, ideas, and traditions. There is no specific, identifiable subject intended. It is simply a painting about magic.

More than anything else, The Magic Circle is a painting about the unknown. As the Tate Museum notes, the painting “reflects his fascination with the exotic.” Thus, The Magic Circle is a window to a fantastical world that bears no resemblance to reality. It does not seek to represent a particular character, time, or place. Instead, it accesses a liminal and imaginative space where otherness and the unknown can be explored.

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